iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

It is totally a different thing from 'keeping in touch with close friends on a one-to-one basis'. I organise events around my city. I have to get in touch with venue managers, fellow promoters, DJs, musicians, journalists, performers and punters etc etc. Most of the events I run are heavily promoted on social networks, namely Facebook. It's just a better way to track down and get the message out to all these different people.
If my band releases a new bit of music, we want to let our 'fanbase' (ahem) know about it, it's a lot easier to post about it on our page.
There are tons of uses for Facebook beyond just staying in touch with a couple of close friends.

I’m ok with using Facebook for professional PR but to my mind that’s quite different from keeping up with friends. Tbf the way anglophones use the word ‘friend’ is one of my biggest pet peeves as an immigrant so that might have something to do with it.

Facebook execs have some jargony line/term about how Facebook isn't really for keeping in touch with your closest friends, it's for keeping in touch with your more peripheral friends -- the people you went to high school with and want to know what they're up to, former coworkers, neighborhood parents of kids your kids see at the playground, etc. And I find that to be exactly true.

pomenitul yr basking in the light of pure, true friendship...so wise

only got time for real friends. kick everyone else i see hard in the face

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg-zC1xXK3E

OTOH one of the weird effects of facebook is that their algorithm winds up creating this arbitrary and self-reinforcing circle of people you interact with most -- for me it's like this friend of my college best friend that I only hung out with three times, a middle aged poet my wife knows, a woman I vaguely had a crush on in high school, a neighborhood mom, a guy I never met who just does really good political posts, and a bass player I played with once, and a lot of this is just about them all being people who seem to post a lot.

I assume you’re taking the piss but it is partly a cultural thing. In many (most?) languages you reserve the word ‘friend’ for a close friend. Kind of like how a small coke in the US would be considered large in France. Everything (formally if not substantially) tends towards the superlative in North America.

Xps

Do you guys ever have the ‘ugh, this friend is liking my posts all the time’ reaction?

yeah, and unfortunately that friend is my mother

I'm not against the concept of social media per se, but I do find the mental gymnastics used to ensure that Facebook remains too big to fail rather unsettling.

― pomenitul

i find the way the human mind works unsettling on a regular basis, sure. i also don't see the point of making it a question of individual morality. facebook isn't going to go away any faster on account of you lecturing everybody who uses it about how wrong they are to do so. nobody cares whether you or i think it's justified for them to use facebook.

Do you guys ever have the ‘ugh, this friend is liking my posts all the time’ reaction?

― suzy

i used to and then he stopped doing it. turns out he died.

^ man alive otm. it becomes a bit like a facebook-curated version of ILX where you're interacting with such a random mix of people and rarely with those coveted close friends. For me it was the ex-girlfriend of someone who I knew with the local music scene; a couple of music journalist who mostly post YouTube videos and politics stuff; someone I went to school with; a Scotsman I used to speak to on a messageboard pre-ILX; and a bunch of Ilxors and ex-Ilxors. Not many other people

I assume you’re taking the piss but it is partly a cultural thing. In many (most?) languages you reserve the word ‘friend’ for a close friend. Kind of like how a small coke in the US would be considered large in France. Everything (formally if not substantially) tends towards the superlative in North America.

Sure but in France they use the word 'ami(e)' to mean 'lover' as well, so it's also confusing. English has 'acquaintance' but it's a bit of a formal thing, and could be seen as a bit rude/impersonal in the wrong context. Also remember that Facebook uses 'friend' as the vernacular for anyone you interact with on FB.

fwiw as a non-anglo I don't recognise what poenitul's describing at all. I refer to what are actually acquaintances as "friends" in portuguese and german all the time. It's not signing a contract of eternal devotion, the equivalents for acquaintance always seem like a diss of sorts, everyone knows what you mean anyway.

Petit(e) ami(e) means boyfriend/girlfriend, ami(e) is quite dated, conjuring up images of pre-Mai 68, even pre-WW2 couples. Copain and copine are more common nowadays, and can indeed convey both friendship and romantic love, though there's a bit of a sexist, heteronormative assumption behind their general use: if I have a copain, chances are he's my buddy because I'm male and he is too; if i I have a copine, then she's probably my girlfriend.

xp

Sorry, I'm not buying this Stockholm Syndrome bullshit. I keep in touch with my long-distance friends via e-mail and it works just fine.

― pomenitul, Wednesday, April 11, 2018 7:36 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'll never defend Facebook but like...my wife and i are both dealing w/varying degrees of "aging parents" via long distance and raising a kid (and trying to maintain his social life and extracurricular activities), while she works a full time office job and i work from home, and trying to maintain our own social lives with the friends we have here AND trying to find time to spend time with each other. we have long-distance friends we don't want to lose touch with but neither side has the time for regular correspondence, and Facebook for its considerable drawbacks is extremely good for passively maintaining contact w/friends and seeing what's going on in their lives and remaining part of their lives somehow and vice versa, when you may not have the time to do so more actively. I'd like to have that time but...no...not happening now.

i don't NOT email my close friends, and i'm on record saying that i think FB is artificial in how you'll have people you forgot existed emerge from the past to reconnect, or people you should have never stayed in touch with still popping up on your wall to comment on a life event you're posting about or whatever. but for my friend who lives in Concord, MA who i'll likely see once per decade from here on out, someone i love dearly and contact periodically via email, it's nice to have them "there" as it were.

variations on this have popped up with every kind of new communication though, even email. even phone, i'm sure! Facebook is different in its creepiness but that's a separate issue from "the ways in which we stay connected with people."

and yeah having tons of friends/acquaintances living in different countries...sure my all-time besties I could still keep in touch with via e-mail, but there's tons of people who I do care about and it's nice to casually keep up with their lives. Sending regular thoughtful e-mails to each one seems impracticable.

Bigger issue is also that even if FB were to disappear tomorrow there'd be plenty of other sources for Cambridge Analytics and their ilk to feast on.

i mean on the negative side i've had someone i hadn't seen since 5th grade want to reconnect in person, and then we did, and he a) wanted to find out all about what happened in middle school after i left b) had some unfinished business he was clearly dealing with from elementary school, and c) was hitting on me! weirdest hangout of my life...

this was a person whose existence i had to clarify by calling my mom to ask if she recalled him and when she hazily did, i had her dig around for my old yearbook to find his photo. this shouldn't have happened, we should have forgotten each other.

i have people that i do consider really good friends that i see once a year a most, because we live far away and none of us are good at keeping in touch and everyone is busy. when we do see each other it seems as if no time has passed. we grew up together and i've known them since i was 5.

but i am very shallow compared to pomenitul

some may drink deep the cup of friendship mead while you merely shotgun the can of casual acquaintanceship

If you haven't organised an elaborate, antediluvian public rite to celebrate the passage from vous to tu (or from Sie to du, usted to tú, etc.) with a specific person, then you are morally, even metaphysically obliged to continue calling them an 'acquaintance'. Duh.

Champagne for my real friends; Facebook pain for my fake friends.

Of course I wouldn't call anyone that I treat by você/sie a friend, that would be insane. But there are, like, dozens of ppl who are not Meaningful Best Friends That I Will Share My Life With but that I don't treat by você/sie. I mean that's pretty much reserved for work relations and elders you want to show respect to.

I’ve always liked FB because of living 4000 miles away from/different continent to people I grew up with; also, a lot of women whose adolescent friendship groups scattered to the four winds pre-interwebs lost touch because many of us went through name changes - guys don’t really have that sense of the disappeared with same-sex friends from school and university. Plus, I’m in touch with all the various branches of my family who are fighting with each other but all talk to me, which is fine by me.

I’ve added my mom on Messenger but haven’t added her as a friend on FB and I expect when she asks why not, I’ll tell her that I need a safe space to vent about all the stupid shit my mom says, LOL just kidding (I’m not, I dread seeing what happens when she figures out memes). It took me months to add my sister, who has the kind of friends who still play FarmVille and share Aunty Acid memes.

I wasn't being serious – there are plenty of people I call tu who aren't even remotely my friends. But then again, I live in Quebec, where the T-V distinction isn't quite as ingrained as it is in France, though when I was there, I certainly never referred to my classmates as vous except when they implicitly insisted on it (they generally wore their bourgeois Catholic background on their sleeve).

xp

Facebook for its considerable drawbacks is extremely good for passively maintaining contact w/friends and seeing what's going on in their lives and remaining part of their lives somehow and vice versa, when you may not have the time to do so more actively. I'd like to have that time but...no...not happening now.

it me! i'm that person who other people remain in passive contact with via facebook. they care, they wish they had more time, and if they quit facebook they are not likely to invest extra time in calling/texting/emailing me. who knows? maybe they would? maybe i am being cynical. learning how to stop doing everything else to communicate and using facebook to stay in touch has had diminishing returns, obviously.

that may pass muster wherever you are, but try getting away with that shit in Quebec, the slide machine of all true friendship

Was that implied in any way? Some of these jibes are off the mark.

i think i'd stay in pretty good touch with my friends without Facebook -- i think another drawback of FB is also it fills your feed with information from the people you know (or knew, or worked with once) but aren't friends with, and just seemingly gives it the same weight as family members or the people you're actually friends with. maybe the algorithm fixes that, who knows, but i don't trust it.

As a side note, Quebec is more North American than French in this regard.

xp

I wasn't being serious – there are plenty of people I call tu who aren't even remotely my friends. But then again, I live in Quebec, where the T-V distinction isn't quite as ingrained as it is in France, though when I was there, I certainly never referred to my classmates as vous except when they implicitly insisted on it (they generally wore their bourgeois Catholic background on their sleeve).

Haha, I getcha. I would still just say that it seems like the French are the exception here, not the Americans. In my experience, anyway. And that if the word is such a hurdle, just register it as "I'd lose a lot of copains if I quit", surely that'd still be a bummer?

some may drink deep the cup of friendship mead while you merely shotgun the can of casual acquaintanceship

― omar little, Wednesday, April 11, 2018 11:00 AM (fifty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In rural Southern Minnesota, I was raised on cans of Busch Light, the friendship of beer

As a side note, Quebec is more North American than French in this regard.

freedom friends

you guys are giving facebook tedium a real run for its money with all this "friend" talk.

Guilty as charged.

lol, i'm just bored today. i think i have a case of the wednesdays. luv u all.

not every day can hold the excitement of old men asking zuck how interweb works.

Tubes. It's a series of tubes.

I feel like a lot of people just didnt use the internet much at all, not socially anyway, til FB's expansion made it the thing they got on board with.

Cos I come from a background where my actual, IRL social group also always communicated online - have done since the mid-late 90s! - via Usenet and Livejournal. That lot mostly then moved to Twitter and refuse to touch FB. As I dont use twitter (I just dont get it, it annoys me), Ive actually lost touch with the day to day of a heap of my actual IRL friends :/ So fuck FB cos this was already happening to me 5 years or more back.

Hahah which I suppose means my answer to the thread is "yes. yes it did".

i wish everyone would quit facebook and join are.na. you can search for me there under my name. you create "channels" (general topics, like "minimalism" or "things that look like butts" or "media criticism") which contain "blocks". blocks are links to things, images, files, etc. you can take anyone else's "block" and add it to any of your own channels. you set the privacy level of each channel you make - you can make it private, you can set it to public/closed (which means others can see your channel but can't edit it), or public/open (which means other people can add blocks to it).

it is tiny and awesome and they're not surveilling you. just join in addition to facebook and get used to another place to share things with people that isn't brazenly fucking you over all the time.

it is one of the best 2 sites on the internet

for people who only use facebook for work/promotion of events, i think are.na would actually work BETTER for it. the only thing it's lacking is 2 billion users to make it ubiquitous, sad lol

(zach scott, not karl malone)

for me it's less of a social media network and more of a way to catalog your own interests and make connections to other related things posted by other people. but you can comment on any "block", you can follow other users, there's a feed that shows what new channels and blocks people have created, you can establish "private channels" with other people. anyway, i'll stop evangelizing. i am an annoying chronic complainer about the lameness of today's internet, and this is an example of a place that is good. it's pretty old, actually (i had an account there 4 years ago and forgot about it, then remembered it again a month or so ago and was astounded at all the improvements they had made), but still newish

I'm interested but isn't it a pinterest clone at its core? (please tell me it's not)

i don't know! i've never used pinterest. i really hate the visual aesthetic of pinterest though, while are.na's is very good (imo)

okay i just tried it for about 10 minutes and couldn't figure out how to do anything. won't be back. i can see the nerd appeal it might have though and it was good at keeping people like me out. which is a good strategy.

lol
yeah it has a bit of a learning curve. the things that are a bit confusing at first (e.g., some text being green, purple, or red) are the things that actually make it less confusing later on (green text is for open channels, purple text is for closed channels, red text is private stuff that only you can see)

last words on it, sorry: make sure to try out www.are.na, not www.arena.com, which appears to be some sort of music subscription service

ello

i know, i know. i own an OUYA. :-/

but i like to try new things and think that it's possible to do better than facebook